JonLowder.com

No Child Left Behind

Today we received a letter from the North Carolina State Board of Education, Office of Curriculum and School Reform Services (click on the image at left to see it).  From the letter:

"Although great gains have been made in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System (WS/FCS), the district did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in Reading (for four years in a row) or Math (for two years in a row) in grade spans 3-5, 6-8, and at the high school level, based on 2005-2006 test results. According to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the district is entering Corrective Action Phase of District Improvement. This identification means several things for the school district.

First, the district will continue to identify steps to improve student achievement by revising the school district's Title I District Improvement Plan. This plan describes what the school district will do to help low-achieving children meet challenging academic achievement standards. In revising the plan, the district will consult with parents, school staff and others...

Second, in revising its Title I plan, WS/FCS is required to focus on the professional development needs of its instructional staff. This must be done by directly addressing the academic achievement problem(s) that caused the school district to be identified for improvement. (Emphasis mine)"

While I'm sure there are teachers that need improvement, and there are some that are incompetent, I don't think you can lay the blame at their feet.  The problem is probably much deeper and I suspect that we parents are as responsible for the kids' failures as the teachers, if not more so.  I'm also sure that there are plenty of kids who are themselves responsible; raise your hand if you know a bright, lazy kid.  So why mandate professional development for teachers and yet not mandate some sort of participation by parents of underachieving kids?  Why not mandate that underachieving kids have to stay after school for tutoring?

The larger questions about whether No Child Left Behind is worth a damn, or if evaluating schools based solely on standardized tests is a good idea are too sticky to get into here.  But simply by looking at the current educational context and accepting the goal of a minimum number of children passing the tests we should ask ourselves if addressing one part of the equation, teachers, is adequate.  I dare say it's not, and I hope that the consultation with parents and school staff will result in at least some discussion of the expectations for parents and students in the process since the law doesn't mandate it. I don't care how much training a teacher gets; if they aren't supported by the parents the kids are lost, and if the kids aren't held accountable then they're going to continue to fail.

**Update:  Esbee has a great post on homeschooling that I think is relevant to this piece.**

How to Make Congress Look Good

Want to make the US Congress look good?  Just compare them to the Greensboro City Council and in particular look at most any of the Congress-critters side-by-side with city councilwoman T. Dianne Bellamy-Small.  First she refused to take a lie detector test because, you know, she had nothing to hide.  Now she's throwing tantrums over cubicle assignments.  From the Rhino:

...so the council area is being reconfigured to give each councilmember a cubicle. That means there are eight cubicles and eight councilmembers and four cubicles have windows, so you can see where a problem might arise.

They tried letting everyone choose but that clearly was not going to work so Councilmember Florence Gatten, who is the councilmember who likes to get things done, took eight pieces of paper and wrote the numbers one through eight on them and had the mayor mix them up. Then each councilmember was given the opportunity to choose a number. Whoever got number 1 would choose first and Number 8 would get the office that no one else wanted. Everything seemed to be going well. This after all was not like trying to balance a $380 million budget, this was choosing a number and writing your name down on a diagram of the office drawn on a piece of notebook paper.

But Bellamy-Small didn't want to play. Holliday walked over to her with the slips of paper in his hand and she refused to take a number. She just kept shaking her head and saying, '"No." much like a three year old.

Holliday was being very nice and pleaded with her, "Just take a number." But Bellamy-Small said, "No, I know what office I want." She then explained that she wanted the back corner office with the window. To which Councilmember Sandy Carmany replied, "We all want a window."

Bellamy-Small simply refused to reach out and take a number so Holliday let everyone else take a number and then walked over to Bellamy-Small with the last number and put it on the table in front of her.

Bellamy-Small refused to touch the slip of paper so Holliday unfolded it for her and informed her that she had number eight. So Bellamy-Small, by refusing to take a number, ended up with the last pick.

No doubt it was obvious to her that this was all a conspiracy to make sure she got the worst office.

At this point Bellamy-Small shook her head and shouted, "Just forget it. Just forget it." Councilmember Goldie Wells responded, "You have to go with the process."

But Bellamy-Small was rescued by an unexpected knight in shining armor. When Carmany had said that they all wanted windows, Councilmember Tom Phillips had responded, "Not me, I don't care." He had said several times that he just didn't care where his cubicle was and since he picked a low number when it was his turn to write his name on the diagram he persuaded Bellamy-Small to point to the office that she wanted and Phillips wrote her name in that spot. At that point Bellamy-Small was sulking to the point where just pointing to the office was a huge chore and Phillips had to ask her several times.

It was a startling display of not juvenile but infantile behavior.